I wonder if the predictions are numbered in order of Gartner's confidence in their predictions, or the importance of the events should they take place.

In any case, this would be a huge change in the IT industry, touching everyone from applications vendors to systems integrators and the channel.

I think 2011 is too soon for this to happen because there are so many systems out there already, and people aren't going to be ripping and replacing in this economy. If we weren't in a recession, I'd say that makes sense.

But traditionally, people swap out equipment or make new investments every five years or so because of accounting principles--not real business need and not because they've got money burning a hole in their pockets.

And while there is much lower up-front outlays for getting cloud computing, it's a fallacy to say there are none. No CTO in his or her right mind is going to sign up with a SaaS vendor without also having some in-house storage and back-up as part of a contingency plan.

SaaS is no longer the great unknown scary thing it was even two years ago, but it has entered the murky waters of enterprise detente. "Trust but verify"--or in this case, "trust but have a fail-over."

You can understand why people want some precautions taken, but an outright ban seems like a stupid decision taken by uninformed people.

My anger here is not because I'm some kind of tech cheerleader, but because I've seen IM and other communications tool make a huge difference in how organizations perform, and it makes me angry to watch our country's leaders deprived of this simple but effective toolkit when our country most needs them to be at their best.

While some observers note that the ban will make it harder for staffers to maintain contact with the "real world," the real problem is a slowing of communication and collaboration.

IM would help improve productivity in government the same way it has in private enterprise.

Surely there are good reasons for this, right?

So far as I can tell, no.

I understand that people use IM to make much more casual conversation than they do in email, and could open themselves up to being misunderstood. Well, tough. They can learn to be a little more careful.

The other objection to IM is around security and e-discovery. But it seems like White House counsel are living in the days of AOL. Smith reports:

"I don't' think it was necessarily a national security issue — I think
it had mostly to do with the records act," said David Almacy, the
former Bush White House Internet Director, who noted that to keep IM, a
White House would probably have to "work with an external contractor to
preserve all that communication in real time."

Yeah, it's real hard to "preserve all that communication in real time."

Every single organization now knows it has to preserve IM communications, which is why vendors like Autonomy are doing so well.

January 20, 2009

It's a curious move for a company that has heretofore placed its bets on providing the pipes and routers that connect computers to one another, rather than the computers themselves.

Clearly, it sees an opportunity to leverage its relationships with VMware (of which it owns almost 2%) and storage-system vendor EMC to break into a market that is still very much in its infancy.

The number of servers that are currently virtualized remains in the single digits, and while VMware is the market leader, Microsoft can catch up quickly with HyperV. Reason enough for Cisco to risk relationships with companies it currently has as business partners--like HP, IBM and Microsoft.

But hats off to Cisco management for daring to forge ahead with ambitious plans during a time of economic uncertainty. (Rumors are that Cisco CTO Padsmaree Warrior is in line to become Barack Obama's pick for national CIO. I've had the pleasure of meeting her at a Cisco event some years ago, and all I can say is that she is formidably intelligent.)

January 15, 2009

Image via WikipediaThe beauty of Web 2.0 is that nobody has to know it has anything to do with KM.

Please stifle the yawns--I won't go into KM in any detail. We all know the sordid history: employees take the most valuable corporate resources out the door when they retire, job to another company or even just change departments. The way to save all that "institutional knowledge" is to force them to pour their brain matter into tedious forms in -- ick -- intranet portals, and self-identify their areas of expertise.

Enter Facebook or LinkedIn, mix in a bit of wiki, some dog-earring, and a smattering of Twitter, and voila! KM disguised as banter and "what are you doing now."

Enter Mike Gotta's interesting discussion on the (failed) role of technology in fostering KM. He's right to say that people have focused too much on tools at the expense of profit.

Gotta, principal analyst with the Burton Group, also notes the entry of Oracle into the Web 2.0 fray. Interesting reading.

When Microsoft launched Uits ambitious Unified Communications strategy in early 2007, it made Nortel a big part of its plans because, as it readily admitted, it didn't really have a reputation in telecom. Redmond recognized correctly that if it was going to beat out Cisco, IBM and Avaya in the IP telephony game, it was going to need a partner that would get it in the door with operations personnel.

Microsoft faced a new set of challenges selling into the large enterprise market it was targeting. First, UC is dependent on selling to a different group, even where telecom is considered part of IT. Second, Microsoft smartly recognized that it has a well-deserved reputation for bringing flawed products to market and letting customers identify bugs.

But it's a well-known fact that telecom has long been considered much more mission-critical than IT networks. It's OK for email to be down for fifteen minutes--but not the phone system.

Nortel was a perfect fit because it brought a huge sales team familiar with the customer base, and a sterling reputation for quality. Nortel suffered for not being sexy, but it was safe, for crying out loud.

Typically, Microsoft took its time developing its stack, but there didn't seem to be any hurry. The IP telephony market has lots of green field, and its a safe bet that companies facing the end of life of their PBX systems will turn to IPBX or other IP-based systems in the future.

Just as typically, Microsoft was arrogant enough to believe that if it got a foot in the door (thanks to the Nortel shoe), it would beat the competition, primarily because of the neat interoperability between its IP stack and its productivity stack.

Now, Microsoft is in danger of losing that steel-toed boot with which it was going to kick down the door of opportunity. While Nortel remains in business today, potential customers are unlikely to pick a vendor with (pardon the extended metaphor) one foot in the grave, particularly in this unsettled environment.

January 13, 2009

You've heard that expression a million zillion times. I just saw that in action.

Watching SportsCenter during my lunch break, I saw a story about a Florida State football player named Myron Rolle. Myron is potentially giving up what shaping up as a lucrative career in pro football in order to spend a year abroad as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University.

He was a pre-med student at FSU, graduated in three years, is enrolling in a one-year master's program in medical anthropology, and plans to become a neurosurgeon, use his degree in medical anthropology to bring modern medecin to developing nations and, later, open a free health clinic in his home island on the Bahamas.

Between Oxford and his days as a neurosurgeon, he does plan to try out (and is likely to be drafted by an NFL team) and play pro football for eight or nine years. That's how he tells it, and it's an impressive, thoughtful plan.

His ambitions reveal a young man who understands his potential and who plans to make the most of it for himself and his community; a realistic yet altrustic person.

What struck me the most was the way the ESPN news anchors revealed a mixture of awe and self-loathing. One, Sage Steele, actually said, "I'll try to get through the next two minutes [segment] without making a fool of myself.

They behaved as if this guy's existence negated their own worth--that if Myron Rolle was alive, there was no point in their own lives.

Am I exaggerating? Only a little. But the degree of self-loathing they demonstrated wasn't really surprising. In fact, you see it every time a smart kid gets picked on in the school yard or prefaces her words with self-deprecating remarks to shield herself from the accusation that she's showing off.

I'm sure that Sage and all the others don't consciously believe that Myron is a mad scientist who is secretly plotting their demise, but that's the subtext: this guy is so smart he could do anything to me and I would be powerless to stop him.

This is a problem old as civilization itself; how else can we explain the death of Socrates? I'm not sure there's a solution other than for smart people like Myron to be aware of this--and hope it doesn't deter them from their altruistic motives.

Seriously, I think we're in the process of watching VHS get the jump on Betamax--and no one is even saying that LTE (aka Long-Term Evolution, a stupid name if there ever
was one) is a superior technology. In other words, no one will miss it (unless you count the carriers planning to adopt LTE).

Even LTE supporters admit that WiMAX has been ahead all along, but now that it has gotten out of its own way, it looks like it's going to finally enjoy the fruits of that head start.

The service is still in its infancy, and spotty service will be problematic for now. Telecommunications Online notes that analysts from Current Analysis are worried about interopability:

“The ‘islands of connectivity’ issue is still a problem, especially as
the devices launched in Portland are not CDMA/WiMAX dual mode. Sprint
has had headaches for years due to both CDMA and iDEN networks that did
not roam seamlessly to GSM networks for data. Even with roaming, it is
not clear (no pun intended) if a Clear USB modem or aircard, let alone
future handsets will be all be able to achieve data roaming with the
GSM world evolving to LTE, let alone other WiMAX variants in emerging
countries.”

But like any network (think about the first few fax machines), its power will grow exponentially as adoption increases, so what looks like a small ripple today will shortly seem like the inexorable march of the Mongol armies.

And as Stacy Higginbotham notes, there isn't much that separates WiMAX from LTE when it comes to quality or end-user satisfaction.

Better yet for the likes of Intel, Sprint and other WiMAX sponsors, Obama's infrastructure stimulus is likely to favor WiMAX simply because it's already there. Tom Foremski notes that Intel is already lobbying the Obama Administration.

January 07, 2009

It might well be a sign of the times that Apple isn't announcing much non-music related product news at MacWorld, while the shrinking CES show can boast that it's the locus of real news of consequence.

The emergence of the Yukon platform and AMD's related alliance with HP will create some competitive heat for Intel and drive netbook prices down even further than they've been.

According to eWEEK's Scott Ferguson, Technology Business Research analyst John Spooner thinks AMD has a strong play in the SMB space. AMD isn't talking specifics, but David McAfee, an AMD executive, says "AMD is looking to
bring Yukon into specific
vertical markets, such as education and government, in the coming years."

The SMB market looks tempting because they seem like a natural fit for the attractive pricing, but I wouldn't neglect enterprise-class businesses. They might well like the idea of equipping large sales organizations with cheaper, light-weight laptops, especially since so many sales people use Salesforce.com and other Web-based applications anyway.

Either way, we're likely to start seeing cheaper, lighter, better laptops in the near future, which is great for our wallets and our backs.

January 02, 2009

"People are our most important resource." Except during recessions, when it suits shareholders to lay them off.

Institutional shareholders have always seemed a little short-sighted, if the desires that senior management attribute to them are to be believed. They're in favor of gaining a few points of EPS today, even if it means losing chunks of market share tomorrow--when a competitor is quicker to the spot of an economic recovery.

They always seem to forget that recessions always end as silently as they began, and that if you're hiring skilled labor to meet new demand, then you're probably too late. Your only hope is that your competition has been as short-sighted as yourself.

This time around, we're also being told that IT jobs are safe because companies need IT more than ever. But we were also told that 2009 IT budgets wouldn't be cut for the same reasons: competitive advantage.

In any case, Corporate America is faced with an opportunity to disillusion a whole new generation of employees. It will be interesting to how they handle things during this recession, compared with what companies did in the early 1990s.